


Rotting Pumpkins, Burning Leaves

by elfin



Series: Hokahey! [2]
Category: Flatliners (1990)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23147893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elfin/pseuds/elfin
Summary: The five gather for an advanced screening of the tv show based on Steckle's book....
Relationships: David Labraccio/Nelson Wright
Series: Hokahey! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1663957
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Rotting Pumpkins, Burning Leaves

Randell’s book, ‘The Debated Meanings of Hokahey’, topped the bestsellers list for twelve weeks. He turned down an advance on a sequel, but he accepted one on a work of complete fiction he’d been scribbling notes on for years. His contract with his publishers meant he retained the rights to the story, and while he said no to a movie studio - much to their dismay - with our somewhat resigned blessing he gave the go-ahead to a six part mini-series made for television. It was all the rage, apparently.

I’d been back in Chicago three years when the show made it to air. Rachel came over and Joe even flew in from LA. Nelson and I picked him up from the airport, and when he saw us together he got this expression on his face like he’d just realised something so obvious he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before.

Randell was involved in the production, as was Liz from the publishing house - his partner of over five years and a woman to be reckoned with. The production company sent Randell a screener DVD and we watched the show together, the five of us, with beers and nachos, and cushions to hide behind when the narrative got a bit too close for comfort. The budget was ridiculous, but they’d brought in young, relatively unknown actors to play us, bolstered by a supporting cast of B-listers.

Right from the get-go, they’ve got a strange, homoerotic undertone running between ‘Daniel’ and ‘Nolan’ which Randell swore to us was something they’d interpreted from the source material, meaning the book. Given that we gathered in the apartment Nelson and I shared, we couldn’t really bitch about it.

The guy playing Nolan - Nelson’s character - looks the part. He’s described in the book as ‘blond, blue-eyed and beautiful until he opens his mouth.’ I laughed when I first read that, amazed Nelson had let it stay until I came back and met the new, improved version. Then I got that he’d have laughed too.

Jason - Joe - looks like a male model and I couldn’t remember Randell describing him that way, but iapparently they extrapolated it from the idea he could get any woman he wanted into bed with very little effort.

Simon - Randell - feels like he belongs on a stage at a country and western music club, with a guitar in his hands.

Rebecca - Rachel - is beautiful, with long, straight hair and elfin features but no less fierce than the others.

Daniel - that would be me - is played by a good-looking, long-haired kid, the glue holding the group together. I was flattered, and slightly self-conscious.

It’s set it in California, well away from Chicago and with an excuse to get more flesh on show. Sex sells, but they keep it within what Randell had deemed acceptable given this was a show about the worst week of our lives.

‘The producers kept calling me, asking if it was based on actual events,’ he admitted during the first arty credits, which listed the actors names over an icy blue ECG display. I actually had to look away for a second because it brought back memories so vividly and suddenly, it took my breath away.

‘What did you tell them?’

He looked comfortable enough, folded into one of our armchairs. He knew how to make himself at home at our place; legs dangling over one arm, a bowl of brightly coloured artificial sweeteners and E numbers in his lap. ‘I told them no.’ Back in school I wouldn’t have trusted him to water my plants or feed my fish. Turns out I could trust him with a secret that had the power to end my career. He’d never tell, I realised, not for money, not for anything. Nelson knew how to choose his friends and he’d chosen well.

Episode 1 of the catchily titled, ‘The Flatliners’, introduces the characters and the relationships, the tensions and frictions between them, but doesn’t explain how they met. It gets some bits spot on, other bits not so much, but that’s a good thing, because watching a dramatisation of our lives was somewhat disconcerting overall.

Back before anything happened, Nelson and Randell had been lab partners, same with Rachel and Joe. I knew the others through Nelson, and I’d known him since my second day at school when I spotted him on campus and fell crazily in lust. I’m not certain I’d have described us as best friends, but we were something. We used to go camping together at weekends, spent most of our free evenings together on campus, Saturday nights in the city.

I was nervous, I realised, to watch Nelson’s first flatline. 

The book relocates our make-shift lab from the church to the basement of a disused wing of a teaching hospital, and the show follows suit. I got why Randell did that; another misdirection to keep our asses off the line, but it also made more sense, made everything more believable. No one in their right minds would try a series of risky medical procedures - where lives depended on having warmth and power - in a draughty building under renovation, with an ageing boiler, leaky roof and dodgy electrics. Randell often referred to us as lunatics back then and he was right, but we were fearless lunatics, at least for a while, before it blew up in our faces.

It was strange, watching my boyfriend’s death and resurrection recreated for television. When I first read the book, I wondered if it was something too personal, too private, to be out in the public domain for everyone to share. I still wasn’t sure. But the show did remind me that in the beginning it was something exciting, something daring. I watched Daniel effectively murder Nolan, heard Simon say he didn’t come to medical school to kill his classmates, and it struck me that’s exactly what I’d done. If we hadn’t been able to revive Nelson, that would have been the end, of his life and mine. At the time, I did it with the same arrogant assurance I did everything; I could bring him back, his trust in me would not be misplaced. Failure, as they say, just wasn’t an option. And with everything that happened after, I’d just never really thought about it in those terms.

I was lost in the memories the show brought back, right up until the scene outside the store where we’d stopped on the way back to Nelson’s place. I’d sent the others inside to get him some fluids and to give us some space, and I’d done a cursory exam of him, sitting in the back of the jeep; bp, temperature, heart rate. I just don’t recall it being quite as intimate as it’s portrayed in the show. We watched Daniel make a thing of getting his stethoscope under the blankets, peeling the layers away slowly until he found flesh.

‘Awww,’ Randell and Rachel cooed together. Nelson threw a cushion at them and missed them both. ‘You guys…’

‘I honestly don’t know how I didn’t see this,’ Joe admitted.

‘They’re making more of it than was there at the time,’ I reassured them.

Rachel scoffed. ‘Say the guys cuddled up on their couch.’

Nelson had his first hallucination, if that’s what it was, that night, alone in the back of the jeep while we were all in the store. Not that he told us at the time of course. God forbid he should have shared. It was a lot, lot later when he described seeing his old dog, Scamp, injured and suffering, making his way towards him along the alley. That was the scraping he’d heard, the sound I couldn’t hear. It was no wonder he was rattled when we got back to him.

The show goes a bit OTT with the neon, the smoke, the foreboding music, and the episode ends with the bidding war in the store before the credits roll.

‘Did you two really do that?’ Nelson sounded strangely incredulous.

Rachel confirmed, ‘We did. Obviously, we were clinically insane.’

‘You were in good company.’ He pulled out of my arms and wriggled off the couch.

‘You okay?’

‘Shots.’ Crazy loon he might have been, but he was also a genius. ‘Do we have limes?’

‘I think so.’

Rachel said she’d check as she headed for the kitchen. ‘Beers too?’

Nelson put the glasses and tequila on the coffee table in front of Joe, who rubbed his hands together in glee. Randell replenished the nachos and refilled his bowl of M&Ms.

It was good to have everyone back together, to have our oldest friends making themselves comfortable in our apartment. When Nelson and I first got together, fifteen years back, being openly bisexual would have been enough to seriously hamper both our careers. Even if I hadn’t left, I don’t think we’d have become a couple. We wanted other things too badly. Only last year, when Nelson and I bought the apartment, did he told the school about me and I told the hospital about him. One of the doctors in my team stopped coming on nights out, but that’s about as bad as it got.

Rachel found out about us the weekend I came back. She said she’d always known. Maybe she had. Like I said, Joe took one look at us at the airport and knew immediately. He was surprised, oddly, but happy for us. Randell… he loves Nelson almost as much as I do. He’s happy for us too, but if I ever do anything out of order, God help me.

Joe was filling the shot glasses when he asked the exact same question I’d asked five years ago.

‘Steckle, why doesn’t the book cover the first night? You know - that night?’

‘That night’ was how we‘d taken to referring to the night Nelson killed himself, the night we brought him back after fourteen minutes, give or take. The actual date, November 2nd, didn’t really mean much to any of us by then. The first experiment took place on October 29th, I flatlined on Halloween night, full moon and everything, and the days and nights that followed sort of merged into one long nightmare.

‘When I tried to write it up ten years ago, it felt too personal, too immediate. It didn’t even make it into the first draft Nelson read.’

‘So the show just ends when he… comes back?’

Randell shook his head. ‘No. The production company wanted to go further with the characters so I wrote it for them. Nelson and David helped.’

I’m not sure I’d have called what we did helping. We shared what we remembered about that night, and the morning, the days afterwards. For twenty-four hours, Nelson was more or less out of it, but my memories are still as vivid as if it happened yesterday; waking up on the floor of my bedroom sometime around dawn, back against the bedstead, no feeling in my left arm, ass aching from the bare boards, my hand numb from being trapped under Nelson’s wrist.  
Everyone stayed at my place that night. Randell has this abstract recollection of waking in a pile of cushions on the floor, empty bourbon bottle clutched to his chest, face mashed into the cover of a medical text book.

We’d taken a risk grabbing the equipment from the makeshift lab in the church, we‘d heard the security guards doing their rounds even as we rushed to pack up. But Nelson had been brain dead for fourteen minutes, we’d got lucky, managing to resuscitate him, but his chances of survival were still low and moving him was a risk. He should have been in the hospital, possibly in the ICU, with machines taking the strain off his heart. So we took the EEG and ECG, the oxygen cylinder, IV, oximeter, anything we could carry as well as Nelson himself, and set it all up in my apartment.

Rachel spent around two hours making coffee, Randell pouring bourbon. Every thirty minutes we’d checked Nelson’s vital signs; temperature, bp, O2, ECG and EEG readings.  
EEG stayed surprisingly strong, possibly because he’d used the cooling blanket before administering the potassium. I don’t think it registered with me at the time, but afterwards I realised he must have done it to give us a chance of bringing him back without catastrophic brain damage.

ECG though, that was a different matter. Around five in the morning, it went crazy and woke us all.

_‘Dave?’_

_‘Heart rate 120. Shit. He’s having a nightmare.’_

_I got onto the bed, hand out, meeting his chest. He’d snapped the strap of the oxygen mask and popped most of the sticky monitoring pads off in his struggle to sit up._

_‘Nelson! Come on, man, you have to calm down.’ I grabbed one flailing hand, tried to push him back down. His eyes were wide open, pupils blown, terrified, as he looked around the room, presumably searching for Billy. ‘There’s no Billy, it’s just us.’ I had a momentary flashback to the jeep in Bensenville. ‘It’s just a nightmare. Come on. Relax. Breathe with me.’ He was seconds away from having a heart attack, the ECG reading 150 bpm. ‘Nelson, come on. Look at me, breathe with me. In - one, two, three - out - one, two, three - in….’_

_It felt like years, but finally out of the corner of my eye I watched the ECG dropping back - 120, 100, 80. I wondered what my heart rate was given it was playing a jazz number against my rib cage._

_Nelson was still looking around, checking he was safe, and when I finally got off my knees and dropped heavily to my ass, the look he gave me was one of utter despair._

_I folded my fingers around his hand._

_‘It was just a nightmare. The cocktail of drugs in your blood stream right now would make Keith Richards envious. You may experience some hallucinations, but if you elevate your heart rate like that again you will experience heart failure. Billy’s gone.’ I could only hope it was true. ‘It’s just us here now.’ He nodded, jerky movements, and after a couple of minutes of fighting exhaustion, his eyes closed._

_It probably wasn’t his first nightmare about Billy Mahoney, definitely wasn’t his last, but it was the one I was there for. I should have been there for more of them._

I momentarily tightened my arms around Nelson, where he sat with his back against my chest, pining me into the corner of the couch. His hand curled around my forearm but he didn’t ask me if I was okay. He knew as well as I did that the show, as the book did five years ago, was bringing memories back to the fore. It was good for us to re-live it as a group, to remember. That way nothing could lurk in the shadows.

A round of tequila later, beers refreshed, we started episode 2. The first scene is Nolan waking from a nightmare, the morning after his flatline.

Even in the book, Randell hadn’t tried to explain why I wasn’t the one to stay over. Even if he’d had the chance to ask me, I wouldn’t have been able to say. Nelson had only been dead for a couple of minutes, and under the most ideal of circumstances, if any circumstances could be said to be ideal. I’d examined him in the back of the jeep outside the store - without turning it into a cheap move, just for the record - and he was stable: strong heart beat, low temperature but not dangerously low, high bp but within expected parameters. He’d probably not even needed a babysitter.

On screen, in his bedroom, Nolan was making eyes at Rebecca as she leaned over him to check his pulse, and it prompted Nelson to complain that he was coming over as a complete slut.

‘To be fair,’ Rachel pointed out, ‘you did come on to me that morning.’

‘I only said you were beautiful.’

‘In a way that suggested you’d like to sleep with me!’

Nelson chuckled. ‘You might have noticed I have a certain type…?’

She smiled at me and I grinned. ‘Intelligent with a good sense of humour?’

He nodded. ‘And being in possession of a dick.’

Rachel squeaked in protest and Randell reached for the remote to pause the DVD, presumably sensing a ‘talk’ coming on. ‘You’re bisexual!’

‘No.’ He shook his head slowly, obviously surprised. ‘I’m really not.’

Even I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Yes, you are!’

He sat up and turned to look at me, bewildered. ‘I swear, Dave, I’m not. I’ve never been with a woman in my whole life.’

‘But… what was all that with Rachel?’

‘All what with Rachel? I told her she’s beautiful because she is.’

I tried to think of other times I thought he was coming on to her but honestly all I could remember was him not liking the idea of she and I together, and given where we were that wasn’t all that surprising.

‘What about that other woman, in the year above us?’

‘What other… ? You mean Chloe?! Oh, my God! I went with her to the movies a couple of times because we shared a love of black and white films! Look, even at the start of the nineties, coming out would have severely limited my career opportunities. I made enough female friends to stop any rumours, but I never gave any of them the wrong impression. At least, I don’t think I did,’ he looked over at Rachel, ‘and if I did, I apologise unreservedly.’ She was shaking her head.

‘You didn’t.’

‘You never had any interest in me anyway.’

She smiled, shrugged. ‘I still love you.’

He blew her a kiss before turning to look at me again. I was gobsmacked. But it was Randell who asked, ‘How did David not know this?’

‘Dave gets pathologically jealous of you when we meet for beers after work. I haven’t exactly taken him through a timeline of my sexual past.’

Nelson pressed a wet kiss to my neck before I could deny it and he was sort of right. Randell was laughing. ‘Really?’

‘Used to be,’ I corrected. ‘When I was still living in New York.’

‘Well, David, I can definitively say I’m not his type. And he’s not mine, to be fair. No tits.’

Joe, who’d been giggling throughout the entire exchange, erupted with laughter.

Nelson settled back against me. ‘Randell, press play for God’s sake before they claim they didn’t know you had a sex change when you were a teenager.’

Honestly, swear to God, just for a second I thought he was serious.

Joe flatlined on the second night, having won the crazy bidding war the night before. For whatever reason, Randell had left out the part about Nelson’s little temper tantrum while Joe was under. Or maybe that’s not what it had been. It was his first time on the other side of the paddles, and I don’t think we considered that. What we’d dealt with the night before, fighting to bring Nelson back, had been a trial by fire and we’d come through it triumphant. We’d experienced the fear and the adrenaline, the horror and the exhilaration. But Nelson hadn’t.  
Maybe that’s why Randell left it out of the book and out of the screenplay. There was another possible reason. I love Nelson more than anyone or anything in my life, but my glasses aren’t half as rose tinted as his when it comes to my other half.

So Jason’s flatline has less drama to it, and a lot more nudity.

The main difference between the TV dramatisation and the book are the visualisations for the flatlining experience, imagined sequences missing from the source material. It hadn’t really struck me in episode 1, because Nelson had often described feeling warmth like the sun and colours that had reminded him of a corn field under a clear blue sky. That had easily translated from the written description book to the visuals on television as him as a kid, running through a field on a sunny day. He’d also spoken of it turning suddenly dark and cold, the comfort giving way to a sense of foreboding and dread. Proving a link between the first electro shock from the paddles and the moment his experiences turned dark was nigh on impossible. But it wasn’t a huge leap to assume that was the case. I’m sure that’s what happened to me just before I woke.

But not Joe. Joe, apparently, saw naked ladies from brain death to the first spark of renewed life, and the show has some fun with that, all very tastefully done, mind, filmed in black and white because it wasn’t about the erotic. For Joe, though, it had been. I remember him saying as much afterwards.

Their canteen is much nicer than ours was. Ours had a sort of sickly pink-yellow paint on the walls, sticky Lino on the floors, dirty strip lights and the very air laced with nicotine. Still, I remember with warmth the horribly early, greasy breakfasts with Nelson before rotations, coffees and doughnuts before classes.

On screen, the other ‘us’s were drinking coffee from clean mugs, sitting around a spotless white table in a room where no student had ever thrown up on the floor before falling over in it. They talks about Jason’s experience having been a positive one, with no negative aspects, before Rebecca and Daniel go head to head in the ‘who dies next’ volley match.

Seriously, if I was that much of a selfish asshole to Rachel it was little wonder she’d barely spoken to me for most of the term. I’m amazed she’d stooped to giving me the time of day after that display of macho bullshit, let alone slept with me. Extenuating circumstances is how we both described it afterwards, meaning there’s nothing like sex to reaffirm life after you’ve experienced death. I should have gone home with Nelson that first night, maybe things would have gone differently.

Randell stayed with Joe overnight, even though he seemed more stable than Nelson had, physically less shaken, mentally less jittery. Presumably because he wasn’t been stalked by his dead dog. We watched Daniel walk Rebecca home while convincing her he should definitely go next because he was an atheist, thus a control. I talk a lot of bullshit sometimes. They kiss almost shyly on the doorstep of her building before he says goodnight. I was a little surprised, because the way I remember it, Rachel walked me back to my jeep. I made a couple of clumsy passes at her which she politely ignored, I offered to drive her home which she politely turned down, and we absolutely didn’t kiss. Also, Nelson’s always referred to Randell as our control, but then again, that’s from a different point of view. Randell was the bar for where our level of sanity should have been.

Meanwhile, Nolan is subjected to the first attack by Sam - Billy - at the subway station.

Nelson had lied to us, told us the following night it had been ‘some very big guys’. If I hadn’t been so focused on flatlining myself, I might have questioned it, because while I wouldn’t have put it passed Nelson to antagonise someone to the point of getting his nose broken, the wound was all wrong. Even back then we’d spent enough time in the ER to recognise someone who’d been punched and someone who’d been beaten up. Nelson had bruising up the left side of his face, his eye was darkening and his cheek had been split open deep enough to need stitches. That was hatred, not annoyance.

Reading about the attack had been difficult enough, watching the dramatisation of it was worse. The stunt work and the makeup on the show is really good. The kid playing Sam is downright scary. I winced when his fist connected with a supernatural strength.

‘How was it even possible?’ Joe murmured almost to himself. ‘I lived it and I still don’t believe it.’

‘It’s not possible,’ I answered. Then, as I watched Nolan sew up his own face on screen, I murmured, ‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ But I knew the answer already. He didn’t bother to give it again.

He did say, ‘You still think it was all in our heads, don’t you?’

Joe looked up, thinking that was directed at him but it wasn’t. I shrugged, refusing to commit. ‘Well, it’s that or Billy actually came back from the dead. We’re scientists.’

‘We came back,’ Randell pointed out.

‘Not after seventeen years. I think that would be pushing it even for Mr Miracle here.’

‘So… you think Nelson… what? Ran into a wall, fell down some steps?’

‘I don’t know. He was acting a little… psychotic…’

Nelson laughed. ‘Because a dead kid was trying to kill me.’

‘All the rest of us just saw things. Hallucinations. Memories pushed to the front of minds after we died.’

‘Why?’

I didn’t have an answer to that. I’ve never been able to find the answers and I’ve searched, researched, spoken to people resuscitated in the ER in Chicago and back in New York.

Joe looked across at Randell who’d paused the show. ‘What do you think happened? You didn’t believe it at the time.’

‘I believe something attacked Nelson on multiple occasions and seriously hurt him; something so real he felt he had to confront it on its own terms and to do that he had to go back. To die. You don’t inject yourself with a potassium overdose if you think there’s any other way.’

That shut us all up for a few seconds while we processed. I looked down at Nelson who was was looking up at me, his head tipped back against my chest, smug little smile on his face.  
‘I swear he’d defend you if you claimed you’d seen Elvis in Starbucks.’

His smile just got bigger.

‘When I saw my father,’ Rachel started, a little haltingly, ‘it was as real as you guys are now. I walked up the stairs that were in our old house. I could smell my mother’s cooking. When I hugged him, it felt real. I can still feel him when I close my eyes, still smell him. I know logically that it isn’t possible I was back in the house, if only because they tore it down years before. I know it’s impossible that I hugged my dead father. But somehow it happened.’

‘It’s still easier to believe your mind created a vision, or a hallucination, so strong it felt real than it is to believe Nelson’s mind conjured up something so powerful it could try to drive a pickaxe through his skull.’ I was playing devil’s advocate, but I’d wrestled with it for over fifteen years.

‘Do you believe I was delusional enough to do that to myself?’

Looking at Nelson now, I would say no way. Remembering the way he had been, the way he’d fallen apart right in front of my eyes… maybe.

Before I could reply, Randell asked, ‘Is that even possible? We found blood on your hockey stick, blood and hair on that fucking screwdriver.’

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Did it even matter? Scientifically, I thought it did, but in the end I said, ‘just press play.’

Halloween night.

Apparently, when he was writing the book, Randell listened to the tapes he’d made at the time. He’d come across this piece of abstract poetry - his words - that he’d dictated early that cold autumn morning over coffee, after another sleepless night.

It’s in the book, and the actor playing Simon does the VoiceOver on the show.

_‘Halloween morning. Rotting pumpkins, burning leaves. Black cats meeting like rats in the alley. It was as if we felt no fear, as if we were already dead and had nothing to lose by dying. Or perhaps it was because we had lived life so well, and loved life so much that we imagined ourselves immortal, overwhelming the powers that be with the force of our passion for science. Or maybe we were just fucked in the head.’_

I would have gone for option C.

I remember waking up that same morning, looking around my room and wondering what I had to lose if I did die, if they couldn’t bring me back. I’d been suspended, sure it was only four months - as Nelson had put it, shorter than a hockey season - but it was still going to impact my score if not my scholarship.

Joe, apparently, spent the day trying to use his near - or actual - death experience to chat up women. That’s when his hallucinations started, images of women on every screen he looked at, speaking directly to him, asking him why he filmed them. That night, when he arrived at the church straight from the campus Halloween party, dressed in a skeleton costume and looking as pale as bone, he said he didn’t feel well. We might have questioned him further if Nelson hadn’t arrived looking like an extra from a George Romero movie.

A couple of details about that night are seared into my memory. One of them is the sound of the party outside; music and laughter, singing and shouting. The other is Nelson standing over me while I asked him not to let go of the rope. I don’t recall actually saying the Sioux Indian war cry Randell named the book after, but I’ve said it before repelling down sheer cliffs or starting particularly dangerous climbs, so it makes sense that I did.

Like Nelson, I felt the warmth of the sun, but for me it had the welcome chill of mountain air. Everything was bright; blues and whites. There was a sense of flying, of freedom. But that quickly changed. I heard the sounds of children chanting, and felt a real sense of dread before I suddenly snapped back into my body, to a burning sensation in my chest, the steady beeping of the ECG and the hissing of the O2 pump.

On screen, the relief, the stress was starting to show as the camera closed in on Nolan and Daniel sharing a look….

‘Is it me,’ Rachel asked, amusement in her voice, ‘or are they implying something?’

‘It’s in fashion,’ Randell told us, ‘opens the show up to a wider audience. Something for the ladies.’

Rachel’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, really?’

‘That’s what the producer told Liz.’ Liz, Randell’s better half.

It made me wonder, ‘Does Liz know that it’s… based on a true story?’

‘I haven’t told her. I think she might suspect it’s something a little more than complete fiction, given how protective I’ve been with it, but I don’t think she’d believe me even if I came clean. I mean, who the hell would believe what we did, let alone what happened? We were there, we lived through it, and most of us don’t believe it.’

He had a point.

Randell hadn’t sugarcoated what happened in my apartment as I lay shivering under a pile of blankets. They’d all come back, although only Rachel stayed after she and Nelson went head to head about who went next. I’d hoped that going myself would stop her, but she was more determined than ever. Still, the argument between Nolan and Rebecca seemed a lot more ferocious than it had been in reality. Building up the drama, notching up the tension. We had turned on him, although honestly he’d been asking for it. Maybe if he’d told us about Billy there and then we’d have had some sympathy, but he didn’t. I love him, now, more than anything in the world, but back then he could be an arrogant asshole when he wanted to be, which was most of the time. Insanely competitive, blindly selfish, yet still utterly compelling.

Rebecca stays. Jason and Simon walk back to campus. Nolan goes home…. I hoped they were playing up the violence of Sam’s attack with Nolan’s hockey stick, because it made me feel sick thinking that’s what happened to Nelson.

‘Jesus,’ Joe was shaking his head. ‘That’s what went down that night?’

‘It’s how I remember it.’

‘Difficult to bash in your own face with something as unwieldy as a hockey stick,’ Randell pointed out, and I knew he was talking to me.

‘I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that no one else was present and he could have walked into a wall.’ As I said it, I tightened my arms around him. I needed him to know I wasn’t denying what he’d been through, just questioning how it had happened. He knew that, we’d discussed it enough times, talked around the alternative explanations over beers, over bottles of wine, shots of tequila, fingers of whisky, with weed, without weed, even - once - completely sober. We’d never come to any sort of agreement, except for one time with the marijuana when we did manage to agree that his apartment should have had more soft furnishings in it.

‘A hockey stick-shaped wall?’

Episodes 3 and 4 sort of merged into one. We missed the credits between them - Randell was fetching more beer and something savoury to balance the insane amount of sweet he was consuming in the form of M&Ms. Joe served up around another round of shots and the more alcohol we drank, the more discussion was happening over the show.

One noticeable difference was Ann, Joe’s ex-fiancee, who left him after a surprise visit when she found his video collection. In the book, that’s brushed over quite a bit and in the show she isn’t mentioned at all; Jason’s a free and single man who just can’t commit to a relationship and films women having sex with him. Joe was just as much of an asshole back then as Nelson, but in different ways.

Another difference was my experience on the subway, when I saw and heard Winnie. In the book, Daniel tells them about it, but because I declined Randell’s interview requests, he didn’t actually know enough to write in the detail and he didn’t want to make it up, so it’s glossed over. For the screenplay, I told him everything I could remember. Her actual words to me are lost to the past, but what he wrote was as poetic as his Halloween Morning piece. There’s a chilling rhythm to it, picked up by the soundtrack as the train rushes out of the tunnel and back into daylight. It sent a shiver down my spine, something in my head reacting to the reminder.

Nelson squeezed my arm and asked me if was okay. I’d had an eight year old girl calling me names, he’d had a nine year old boy attacking him with blunt objects.

‘I’m fine. It’s just… weird watching it like this.’ It would have been worse if the book hadn’t come out first, if we hadn’t had five years to come to terms with this fiction based on a small part of our lives. ‘Are you okay?’ He nodded, serene smile on his face. Of all of us, he’d had the most to come to terms with, yet he was possibly the one who’d found the most peace.

‘Hey, that never happened!’ Joe was pointing at the television but accusing Randell, who had his hands in the air in surrender.

‘I needed something to pad out your story, make sure the audience sympathised. I know you didn’t want Ann mentioned and they asked me to come up with something else.’

We’d missed something, obviously. ‘What happened?’

Randell picked up the remote and skipped back a scene. When he pressed play, Jason was leading a new woman up the stairs to his loft apartment, glancing at the camera hidden in the rafters as they passed under it. When he stops and turns to kiss her, the small television set switches on and a naked woman looking straight into the camera asks him why he’s doing this.

‘I was just riffing on what you’d already confessed to,’ Randell defended himself, and I couldn’t find fault with it.

‘I’m just saying,’ Joe sat back, ‘that never happened. I’m not denying the rest of it.’

Randell threw a handful of M&Ms at him, and I knew we’d be finding them for weeks to come.

Rachel had flatlined before I could get there in time to stop her. The incident on the subway had utterly thrown me and I’d missed my stop, making me late to the church. By the time I’d arrived, running, out of breath, Nelson had already put her under. I made them bring her back, aborting the experiment after one minute twenty. That’s when Nelson’s choice of location for his insane, impossible lab bit us on the ass. We’d been lucky for three nights, but it was raining heavily on November 1st and the leaking roof shorted out the dodgy electrics. We got her back the old fashioned way, but the strain, the stress was showing. While Rachel went to the bathroom, I’d told them what I’d seen on the subway. Joe had confessed about his video collection, about the women who were haunting him. And Nelson finally told us about Billy.

Jason, Simon and Daniel lay into Nolan in a way I don’t remember us doing, but maybe I’d just willingly forgotten. They accuse him of keeping things from them, being immoral, unscientific, selfish. In the heat of the argument, Daniel yells at him, saying he should have told them, and Nolan replies that they wouldn’t have gone under if he had. 

There was something in the tone of his voice, in the underlying fear and desperation, that took me straight back to that cold, wet night. I remembered the exchange, astonished Randell remembered it then realised he’d probably recorded the whole thing.

‘Misery loves company,’ Nelson murmured, and that was exactly what I was thinking. He didn’t tell us because he didn’t want to be alone in the terrible place where he was. He wanted us there with him, not to drag us down too, not precisely, because even he wasn’t that much of an asshole, but because he needed us to experience the same things he was experiencing. He needed us to assure him he wasn’t losing his mind.

I’d stayed with Rachel that night. She was already jumpy having seen her father back at the church, but true to our form she didn’t tell me that, not then. I knew she was hiding something. By then, I knew we were in trouble. Joe and Randell had gone back with us to her place, bugging me with questions about what I thought Nelson did to Billy.

Just as we’d done, the other us’s snapped at each other before apologising in hushed voices. It was basically what had happened as far as I could recall. After the scene at the church, Nelson had walked away from us. On screen we watched as Nolan screwed a heavy metal deadbolt to the door of his apartment and sat down on the floor in front of it, clearly unhinged, screwdriver in his hands, challenging Sam to come and get him.

‘Didn’t your apartment have a back door?’ I murmured, and Nelson nodded against my chest.

‘I did both but… I have no idea why. How that was ever going to keep out a fucking ghost.’

‘But it makes sense - he had physical form, he must have done to be able to pick up the hockey stick. Stood to reason he couldn’t pass through a locked door.’

Nelson tipped his head back again, gazing up at me. ‘Ah, but he did.’

On cue, on screen, Nolan waking to find himself staring up at an expression of hatred and malice just before the butt of the screwdriver is brought down in a wide arc into the side of his head.

Nelson winced at that, and so did I. It was little wonder he hadn’t wanted to be alone.

There was a weird silence in the room as the credits rolled on episode 4. Nelson announced he needed a piss as he got up from me and the couch, breaking the silence and the tension. Joe poured more shots, Rachel replenished the food and I got more beers. Randell seemed to be doing okay for E numbers. We took a break from reliving our nightmare, mulling around the room. Nelson came back in and stole a fistful of M&Ms from over Randell’s shoulder, which earned him a swipe at his arm. He laughed as he dropped them into his mouth.

I looked at them both, old jealousies seeming almost petty at that moment. If anything happened to me, at least Nelson would have someone to look out for him, to be there. A good friend with a worrying addiction to artificial colourings. ’How you’re not the size of a truck is beyond me.’

‘Stress,’ was Randell’s instant reply.

‘Why are you stressed?’

‘There’s a television show going to air next week based on a book I wrote about the worst week of my best friends’ lives.’ He held out one arm. ‘Take my pulse. I’m so nervous it’s almost like I’m back there.’

‘Your pulse is racing because you’ve eaten your own body weight in artificial sweeteners,’ I had to point out. ‘If we were going to kill you, we’d have done it when the book came out. And don’t doubt that, because we’ve all killed each other before. You’re sort of unfinished business.’

We’ve always had artistic timing; Rachel came in with a bowl of nachos covered in cheese at the right moment, so that when Randell looked up we were all down staring at him.

‘Quit it! I’m uncomfortable enough as it is!’

Nelson walked back over to the couch. ‘You don’t look uncomfortable.’ He grabbed a handful of nachos and waited for me to get settled back into the corner before making himself comfortable against me.

‘It’s actually quite well done,’ Rachel reassured him while waving a plate of burritos under his nose.

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m coming over as a needy female looking for a strong man, Nelson and Joe are coming over as slutty assholes, and David’s a hero.’ We all had to look at her to check she was joking around because actually it wasn’t far from the blunt truth. ‘Not sure about you though….’

‘The sensible narrator, the voice of reason?’

‘Our enabler?’

He looked shocked. ‘I never enabled you!’

It was Nelson who pointed out, ‘You literally brought most of the equipment we needed to the church on the first night.’

‘Because you asked me to!’

I leaned down to say quietly, ’He’s never going to see the irony.’

Episode 5 opens with Rebecca gathering her things in a rush to get out, to get somewhere. She’s upset, rattled, and while Daniel pleads with her to tell him what’s going on, she won’t talk to him, just tells him to lock up when he leaves, leaving him to lament why no one will open up to him. 

I know how he felt.

‘Did that happen?’ Rachel asked me, but I didn’t remember it.

‘You wanted to speak to the old lady in the hospital who kept asking you if it was okay to die,’ Randall reminded her.

‘That’s right! I’d reassured her she was going to a good place, I wanted to tell her I’d been wrong.’

‘And what was she supposed to do with that?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘Looking back, I’m glad she’d passed before I could tell her.’

Daniel goes out to his old high school, an abandoned building in a suburb of the city. He stands at the wire fencing, looks over the dusty playground, and as he remembers, the rusted roundabout starts to turn, its wooden boards creaking. The swings starts to move, back and forth, chains creaking against their hinges. He lifts a hand to the wire and the dust is swept away by sunshine, children materialising in the playground, the eight year old Winnie stands in the centre of the chalk hopscotch board on the ground. He sees himself as a child, circling her along with the other kids, taunting, chanting, name-calling, as Winnie cowers with tears in her eyes. He steps back, and the hallucination disperses. The swings and the roundabout still, the dust fills the air and all he can hear is the traffic and the trains.

‘Did you actually see that?’ Nelson asked me, and I honestly don’t know.

‘I don’t think I saw her again after the subway, but… I might have done. I’m not sure if anything happened at the school, or if I just imagined it.’

Whatever had happened, it was enough to rattle me, enough to go back to my apartment and start calling every Hicks in the phone book until I found Winnie’s parents.

Meanwhile, Jason is being stalked by more women and in the flesh now, asking him if he wants to go for a drink, if he wants to have sex. Each time he escapes one, there’s another waiting for him around the next corner. Haunting, stalking him.

They went back to class, Rachel, Joe and Randell. I found Winnie, or Winnie’s address, and I was about to leave for Bensenville when Nelson showed up. I will never, ever forget how he looked that morning; bruises coming out across his face, eyes dark like he hadn’t slept in days, deep injuries to his temple, favouring his left leg, leaning heavily on the bannister. Every day he came into school looking immaculate; clean shaven, hair washed and blow dried, pristine white shirt. That morning, he was a mess; the illusion shattered.

The same scene between Nolan and Daniel is oddly touching. I would have left him there on the stairs and gone to Bensenville alone if he hadn’t looked as if he was completely unravelling, if he hadn’t said didn’t want to be alone. If he hadn’t scared me so much. Nelson had never, ever showed vulnerability before, not to me, not to anyone as far as I knew. He was coming apart, and as much as I didn’t want to be close by when he shattered, I did still adore him. Despite the lies, and the withholding of some very fucking important information.

But on screen, that scene is something else. I watched, agape, as Daniel closed in on Nolan on the landing, brushed featherlight fingertips over the cuts to his face, moving strands of hair back behind his ear to examine the one at his temple more closely. I think I’d asked Nelson if he wanted me to take a look and he’d said no.

‘How is it?’ Daniel asks and Nolan replies, ‘Bad enough.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I found Winnie Hicks.’

‘Can I come with?’

‘She’s a two hour drive away.’

‘Dan… please. I really don’t want to be alone.’

Throughout the whole exchange, there’s no more than a few inches between them. It’s so intimate I got hard, and Nelson was taking advantage, rubbing against me.

‘That definitely didn’t happen,’ he murmured with a smile.

I glanced over at Rachel who was fanning herself. ‘That was hot.’

‘That’s supposed to be us!’

‘But you’re… you.’

Nelson laughed. ’No offence taken.’

’Sorry.’ She was grinning at us. ‘No offence meant. But they’re two hot young actors seconds from making out and you two… you’re like brothers to me.’

‘Didn’t you guys sleep together?’ Randell, always the sensitive one.

‘Once.’ Rachel and I answered in unison.

‘That night, actually.’ I pointed to the television where Rebecca was freaking out in class because one of the corpses had turned into her father.

‘As Nelson was killing himself.’

I was about to respond, but Nelson beat me to it, warning him gently, ’Stop it.’

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ It sounded sincere. ‘Sometimes I can’t help myself. Blame the tequila.’

Nelson pointed out, ‘Besides, at about the time Dave and Rachel were together, the three of us were in the cemetery.’ He sat up as far as he needed to in order to look at Randell. ‘I called Dave’s place from the phone box outside the church and Rachel answered, he’d already left to collect you two from where I’d left you standing. So stop blaming Dave for what was my fault. It’s been long enough. Okay?’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’ He nodded. ‘Sorry, Dave.’

For a second, it reminded me so much of the hushed apologies from the night Rachel flatlined that I almost laughed.

We’d missed most of my - Daniel’s - apology to Winnie Hicks, but caught the last of it, interspersed with menacing shots of the jeep from low camera angles; Sam circling Nolan.

‘I thought you were incredibly brave, doing that,’ Nelson told me, settling back against me, lacing his fingers through mine.

‘I think you said I had balls of steel.’

‘Same thing.’

‘When you killed yourself to apologise to Billy, I thought you were incredibly stupid.’

‘Thank you.’

On screen, Daniel was running up to the jeep, yelling Nolan’s name over his screams. As soon as he picked up the rock, I knew what was coming. It had been a sort of standing joke between us in the weeks following, after Rachel first noticed the broken window on the driver’s side of the jeep and asked about it, pointing out the obvious, ‘Why did you go in through the tarp at the back?’

All four of them erupted into cheers and applause when Daniel broke the window of the jeep to open the door. I’d asked Randell a hundred times to change that detail for the screenplay but he’d refused, saying, ‘It’s history, it happened. You can’t go back and change the past.’ Cheeky fucker.

‘I think they’re actually going to start making out.’ Rachel was sitting up in her chair as, on screen, Daniel was leaning over a terrified Nolan, the pickaxe held between them. It wasn’t the only thing.

‘I think they might actually be dating,’ Randell chose that moment to tell us. ‘The actors I mean. They were practically inseparable on set, and I’m sure Liz told me they were an item.’

‘That’s going to do wonders for audience numbers.’

Randell was grinning happily, a little smugly. ‘Maybe.’

Rachel sat back. ‘I guess they’re not going to make out then.’ She sounded so disappointed I almost volunteered to put on a show but stopped myself in time.

‘Remember this is the night Daniel and Rebecca get together,’ our industrious author was at pains to point out.

‘Transference,’ Rachel replied without a second thought. It made me wonder if that’s what she thought she and I had been.

’It wasn’t,’ I reassured her. ‘I really fancied you.’ I hoped it was the right thing to say, sitting there with my boyfriend in my arms.

She looked over at us and smiled. ’I know you did.’

The ride back from Bensenville was intense. Nelson in the passenger seat, feet up on the dash, hugging his knees, biting his fingernails, glancing out of the window every time we slowed. I kept reaching over, rubbing his arm, his leg, any part of him I could touch to reassure him. That wasn’t in the book, because I didn’t tell Randell about it and apparently neither did Nelson. But I was surprised the screenplay writers hadn’t taken the opportunity for more physical contact.  
I spent the whole journey back trying to reassure him, yet the moment we arrived back at my place, where Randell and Joe were waiting on the steps of my building keeping watch over Rachel, I palmed Nelson off on them, told them to help him find Billy, and took Rachel up to my apartment where she told me about her father. Where we ended up sleeping together. I’m as much of an asshole as the other two.

Rebecca and Daniel have a heart to heart too, which also somehow ends with them in bed, even on a show which seems intent on insisting Daniel and Nolan could potentially become an item. 

I’m pretty sure that hitting on Rachel after what she’d told me was a dick move. But she’d wanted me as much as I’d wanted her. Or maybe she’d just needed the physical thing as much as I did. I think Rachel might have been a little disappointed the show hadn’t chosen to make a couple of changes, and let Nolan be the one Daniel affirmed his life with that night. But it was still early days for LBGT+ representation in the media, despite the success of Queer as Folk.

While Daniel and Rebecca get to know one another better, Jason follows Nolan’s directions to the cemetery where Sam is buried.

Nelson and I went on the anniversary of Billy’s death, the first year I was back in Chicago. We took flowers and laid them on his grave. 

I recognised the cemetery on screen as the big one in LA where every production needing a graveyard is filmed. They’d gone at night, and added smoke and shadows, let Nolan take a circuitous route to get to Sam’s memorial. Nolan looked truly unhinged, hanging off the tombstone, vivid bruising on his face, red eyes with dark rings; a man losing his battle with terror. I wondered if Nelson had looked that way.

He tells them the story of Sam Mitchell, which is the story of Billy Mahoney, how he and his friends tormented the kid at school, called him names, picked on him, pushed him over, stole his lunch money. Kids’ stuff. Until they’d chased him through a field one afternoon, up a tree, and he’d lost his grip and fallen, breaking his neck as he landed, hitting and crippling Nolan’s beloved dog. As Jason and Simon are taking that in, Nolan runs off, leaving them behind in the dark, shouting back at Jason that he needs to borrow the car. It’s exactly what Nelson did.

As Randell said, Nelson had made his mind up on the sidewalk outside my place, an hour before he’d left them stranded at the cemetery. The circular route he’d taken to get to Billy’s grave was to confuse them so they couldn’t follow him when he ran off, buying himself the time he needed to get to the church and kill himself. They'd called me because, well, who else were they going to call? I'd reluctantly left Rachel in my apartment and went out to collect them. It was gone midnight.

On screen, Rebecca was outside the bathroom. I was interested in how they'd play this scene, one I hadn't been there for, one I still couldn't believe. 

The light on the other side of the door changes, and with a shaking hand, she opens it and hesitantly steps inside, not into the bathroom, but into her old family home.

’Is this what happened?’ Joe asked quietly. She didn’t seem upset and I was starting to think maybe a therapist wasn’t a crazy idea. It had obviously helped her and Nelson a great deal.

‘It was more… abstract. I… felt the house rather than saw it. I could smell it. I hugged my father. Nothing will ever convince me that didn’t happen.’

We were all too drunk by then to question her experience further. And the show was notching up the pace. Jason and Simon huddle by the phone box, under the lonely streetlight, so when Daniel pulls up in the jeep they can’t climb in fast enough.

‘Sam Mitchell died sixteen years ago, and whether he actually is or not, Nolan feels responsible.’

I remember hearing Randell say almost that exactly same line, remember the hammering of my heart when I realised what that meant, how Nelson planned to find Billy and atone, how he was going to do exactly what I’d fucking told him to do. I drove at breakneck speed through the city back to campus, back to the church. I was so scared, for him and for us. 

‘Tell Dan… I’m sorry.’ We listened to Rebecca as she tried to reason with Nolan, but as with Rachel and Nelson, there was nothing she could say.

If Nelson had died, it would have broken my heart that I hadn’t been there to take his call.

Nolan stumbles into the hospital and takes the service elevator down to the basement. He switches the cooling blanket on and draws the potassium into a syringe. He’s remarkably adept at trying the rubber tourniquet with one hand, getting himself up on the bed with the blanket over him, injecting himself.

It’s what Nelson did, alone and scared.

Television needs excitement, drama. Despite not having even switched the machine on or attached any pads to himself, the ECG artfully monitors Nolan’s slide into death; between each loud blip, each blue spike, are flashes of Sam’s attacks, each one more horrific than the last, each one more vivid. The blips get louder, the spikes closer, building finally into a crescendo of violence and an electronic scream as the ECG flatlines and Nolan dies.

The credits rolled on episode 5.

There were no beers, no break between 5 and 6. Randell let it play.

It opens on a dark day, three kids chasing a fourth through a field. This time, it’s the nine year old Nolan who’s the victim, he’s the one to seek refuge in a blackened tree. He’s the one to fall, to crash through the dead branches, to break his dog’s back as he lands.

Nelson once told me what happened that night, while he was dead. He hadn’t been as completely honest with what he’d told Randell. So while the screenplay translated what he’d said into visuals for its audience, it was never going to be all that accurate.

Daniel brings the jeep to a screeching halt at the curb outside the old wing of the hospital, all three of them running inside. They take the stairs, three at a time, banging through the doors, turning on everything in the lab. Simon finds the dropped bottle of potassium and announces it as cause of death, Rebecca puts the blanket on to warm, Daniel tears open Nolan’s t-shirt for effect, Jason sticks pads to his temple and chest as Daniel charges up the defibrillator. Rebecca runs in after they’ve hit Nolan twice with 350 joules.

‘He called me… it’s been nine minutes.’

Those words still caused a wave of nausea in my stomach. That’s when the panic set in. That’s when we started injecting Nelson with everything we had. Nine minutes was too long, even with a body temperature of 86 degrees, his brain was being starved of oxygen, cells and nerves were dying.

On screen, nothing was working. Daniel yells at Nolan to come back while at the same time Simon pleads with Daniel to let him go. Twelve minutes. Finally, Rebecca pushes Daniel away and he stumbles back, arms up, tears in his eyes. That was me.

The recriminations are the same; Simon posturing that they brought it on themselves, that they deserved to lose one of their own to Death after snatching so many back from his grasp.

Rebecca chimes in with, ‘I could hear it in his voice, Nolan thought he deserved to die’

But Daniel, just like me, wasn’t having it. ‘He was just a kid. Sam’s death was an accident. He didn’t. Deserve. To die.'

He launches himself at the defrib, grabs the paddles and charges it to 400 before the others can stop him. They all yell at him not to, but he turns and delivers the high voltage shock into Nolan’s body. The ECG blips once.

In the visualisation of Nelson's actual death experience, Nolan sits up where he's crumpled at the base of the tree from which he’s fallen. Voices can be heard calling to him in the distance, and while Sam - anger and hatred gone - beckons him forwards, into the light, Nolan gets to his feet and starts running, away from him, across the field, towards the voices.

Daniel charges for another shock when Rachel stops him.

‘Oh, my God….’ The ECG blips once, twice, flatlines, then comes back.

‘Come on, Nolan.’ That’s Jason.

‘Easy, don’t rush him.’ Rebecca.

‘Please, Nolan. Come back to us.’ Daniel.

Simon places the oxygen mask over his face and miraculously, he starts to breathe. Daniel drops the paddles. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Nolan turns his head and Simon moves the oxygen mask long enough for him to thank them. Then his eyes close, the oxygen mask is replaced, and Jason says, ‘We have to get out of here.’

Randell paused it there, announcing he needed to pee. I think he might have needed a couple of minutes alone too. Rachel was still looking towards the television, surreptitiously wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. I might have been holding Nelson a little tighter than I had been earlier on. Joe walked over to us, put his hand on Nelson’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, saying, ‘Love you, man.’

It took us both by surprise. Floored me more when Nelson replied, ‘Love you too, Joe,’ without pause, and absolutely meaning it.

I added, ‘Do we though?’ Just to ease the tension slightly and thankfully it worked. He cuffed me gently around the head with the back of his hand as he headed for the bathroom.

They have the same brief argument on screen as we had in the church, although already being in the hospital makes their reasons for not sneaking Nolan into the ER all the more flimsy. Still, their futures are on the line the same as ours had been. 

What we’d done could have got us expelled; goodbye medical school, goodbye career. Even if the nurses hadn’t realised the significance of the defrib burns or the bruising on Nelson’s chest, we’d have had to tell them about the injections, explain everything that was in his bloodstream, in case they gave him something that mixed with it all and killed him. 

On screen, they obviously make the same choice we had; less dangerous for them, way more dangerous for Nolan.

We’d let Nelson be as long as we’d dared but security could have arrived at any moment and we’d needed to clear out.

We’d taken the warming blanket from him, Randell covering him immediately with his winter coat. Retaining body temperature was going to be a problem. I’d picked up his trench coat from the floor, and thankfully Rachel had had the foresight to grab the bucket we’d used the night before to catch the rain leaking in through the holes in the roof, because as Randell and I very gently sat Nelson upright, he’d lurched sideways and vomited. We should have been expecting it the same way Rachel had, given the cocktail of drugs we’d pumped into him. Her bedside manner was flawless, reassuring him quietly as his stomach heaved and his body made what looked like several very painful attempts to rid itself of some of the poisons within it. At least he hadn’t eaten much in the previous few days.

Once he seemed to think the purge was over, Rachel had taken the bucket to flush it and get him some water. Joe had grabbed as much of the equipment as he could, while we got Nelson into Randell’s coat, hanging his own trench coat, my leather jacket and Joe’s fleece around his shoulders too. He’d still been shivering under all of it.

Randell and I had supported him between us as we’d moved him as slowly as we were able. He was barely conscious, head tipping against mine, trying to walk for us but losing even the fight to stay awake. Any additional strain on his already traumatised heart could have sent him into cardiac arrest, so the slow journey out to the jeep was stressful for all of us and it must have been agony for him. He’d made no sound though, and I swore I could feel his fingers trying to clutch at the hem of my jumper.

We’d sat him in the back of the jeep, threw down all the blankets I had in there, and lain him carefully on them. Rachel had gone down with him in an attempt to cushion what was going to be a bumpy ride and the rest of us climbed in up front. I drove as carefully as I could, but the roads on campus weren’t great and even though it was barely a five minute journey it felt so much longer.

Rendall’s caricatures of us are are a bit more sensible. Given Nolan’s already on a gurney and they’re already in the hospital, they move him from the lab to the jeep on the trolley, getting him up only once they reached it, shifting the equipment still connected to him into the back with him.

‘Why didn’t we do that?’ Joe asked the obvious, and the answer was even more obvious than the question.

‘Because we didn’t think of it. Randell’s had fifteen years to come up with what we should have done.’

If getting Nelson from the church to the jeep had been difficult, getting him up to my top floor apartment had been a nightmare. Again, Randell and I had practically carried him, and halfway up he’d made this sound, like a strangled gasp, and I swear I’d thought he was going to have a heart attack right there on the stairs. He didn’t, and afterwards I’d realised he was probably just in pain given three of his ribs were broken and another two were cracked. The bruising was coming out even as we’d finally, blessedly, got him onto my bed. I’d stripped him, gave him a quick examination while the others got the O2, ECG and IV saline set up. Along with the injuries to his ribs, his ankle was swollen, his eyes were black, the cut on his head from the pickaxe was slightly infected, and there could have been a hundred other internal problems we couldn’t see.

It was just sheer luck that I had half a course of broad spectrum antibiotics left over after I’d picked up something nasty on a trip aboard the previous summer. I had Rachel crush them into powder and add them to a minimal amount of water which I poured down Nelson’s throat. Which was fun. Once he was as comfortable as we’d been able to make him, I’d cleaned and dressed the pickaxe wound. Back at Winnie’s, we’d washed it with an old bottle of water I kept in the jeep, but obviously it hadn’t been enough.

On screen, Simon was saying, ‘He should be in the fucking hospital,’ and he was right. But by then it was too late, the decision had been made. 

I don’t know how long I sat on the edge of the bed, watching the ECG, my own pulse jumping each time a spike failed to peak where it should, worrying about what we’d do if his heart stopped again. Randell had bought me a generous measure of bourbon and stood over me while I drank it. He told me I was probably in shock but it hadn’t felt like shock. Rachel had followed it up with coffee a little while later, but still I must have fallen asleep, because the ECG alarm woke me, woke all of us, when he had the nightmare. And I must have fallen asleep again afterwards too, once we’d got him settled again, sitting on the bare floorboards with my hand tucked under his wrist, fingertips at his pulse. For my comfort or his, I don’t know. Probably both. It really didn’t matter by then.

When the sun rises in Los Angeles, spilling light into Daniel’s apartment, all five of them are asleep. In the lounge, Rachel’s curled up in an armchair, Jason’s sprawled on the couch and Simon's crashed out on a bunch of cushions on the floor, empty bottle hugged to his chest. The camera moves through into the bedroom to show Daniel asleep on the edge of the bed, hand wrapped around Nolan’s wrist. It shows the ECG tracking a steady heartbeat.

I’d woken around dawn, and after checking Nelson’s vitals and changing the empty saline bag for a fresh one, I‘d gone through to put a pot of coffee on as quietly as possible. The others had all been passed out in the lounge, empty glasses on the floor at their feet. I remember wondering how much of the bottle Randell had drunk.

Checking the pockets of Nelson’s coat, I’d taken his cigarettes and lighter and gone out onto the fire escape. I’d smoked for about a year when I was eighteen and stupid, quit because I couldn’t afford it. Now and again I’d shared one of Nelson’s. That morning it was a cold winter one, a sharp frost in the air. I could smell the city and for that one morning only, it smelt amazing, alive.

Sitting on the metal step, I’d pulled the smoke into my lungs and let myself just sit without thinking for a few precious minutes. Daniel doesn't do this, because as far as I know I never told anyone about it. By the time the others had woken, I was taking them coffee, trying to work out whether or not I was hungry and thinking I should try to eat something, unable to remember the last time I had.

We’d let Nelson sleep, possibly because we were scared to find out what would happen when he woke. We couldn’t rule out brain or nerve damage, given how long he’d been gone. Longer term side-effects too, like the epilepsy I didn’t know about until five years ago. At least his breathing had remained normal, as had the oxygen levels in his blood. We’d stopped the O2 in the middle of the night, after it became obvious the mask over his face was upsetting him. 

Rachel had asked if she could take a shower and I’d told them to just treat it like it was their place. Afterwards, she’d taken one look around my kitchen and had gone out to buy groceries. Joe had returned to his apartment to fetch his little black book, a campus directory and a Chicago phone directory, and after Rachel got back and we’d made soup, Joe and Randell had settled down in the lounge to find contact numbers for the quite astounding number of women Joe had slept with in the last three years.

Daniel checks on Nolan after they eat, sitting on the edge of the bed to take an oximeter reading, his temperature and to check his pulse despite the ECG still monitoring it. Nolan opens his eyes when Daniel lifts his hand and presses his fingertips to his wrist.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey. How are you feeling?’

‘Like I was… hit by a train.’

I laughed, because it’s exactly what Nelson had said but there’s no way he’d remember it, and I never told Randell, who was looking at me oddly.

‘What?’

‘Nothing!’

‘I swear I did not write this level of homoerotica into the screenplay.’

‘That’s not…. That line, about the train, that's what Nelson said I asked him how he was that morning.’

‘Honestly?’ He looked suddenly pleased with himself. ‘I guess I know him better than I thought.’

I twisted round to look at him. ’Seriously, do I have to challenge you to a duel?’

He almost fell out of the chair laughing, pulling himself together in time to look up at a scene with Simon and Jason discussing which Sara Crosby was the one he’d slept with.

‘It took us fucking ages to find all those women,’ he reminded Joe.

‘Hey, I’m not apologising because I was a stud back then.’

‘Slut is more accurate,’ Nelson pointed out.

‘You can talk!’

‘Moi? Like I’ve said, I was only interested in Dave.’

‘You just made us think you wanted Rachel.’

‘Convincing people I was straight was my goal, but I was happy with bi-sexual.’

‘Anything but gay.’

‘It was a different world.’

That it was.

By the afternoon, Nelson had been sitting up, drinking soup and talking without hesitation or any discernible difficulty. To say we’d been relieved was the understatement of my entire life. I’d pinched his legs and the backs of his hands and he’d told me to fuck off, which I’d taken as confirmation he still had feeling in his limbs. I should have pricked his fingertips.

I‘d strapped up his ribs, made him answer some basic questions about himself, and some more complex ones - the kind you’d find on a medical exam paper. He’d passed with flying colours. He was a lucky son of a bitch. We all were.

Physically, he‘d been shaky. He’d needed to lean on me to make it to the bathroom and back to bed, and he’d started to shiver after a minute or so. The bruising had come out on his chest, arms and face so he looked like he’d been in a boxing match with his arms tied behind his back against a man twice his size. My outburst in the church had contributed to the myriad marks on his chest and I’d tried to apologise for it but he wouldn’t hear it.

‘You saved my life,’ was all he would say, ‘you don’t owe me anything.’

In the here and now, Nelson pulled his fingers back through mine and circled them around my wrist, finding my pulse. It was one of those little things we did, reassurance, understanding, affirmation. The things we both needed from time to time.

Joe handed out more shots, emptying the bottle. I was definitely fuzzy by then, buffered by the alcohol. I wasn’t sure I could have watched the whole show sober, or without Nelson close to me.

There’s a montage of Jason visiting each one of the women he’d filmed, explaining and apologising, promising the tapes had been wiped and destroyed. He’s slapped more than once and he deserves it. That’s followed by a scene with Simon looking in on one of his classes, turning his back and walking away. Rebecca and Daniel’s story is closed out on the steps of his building, looking meaningfully at one another and promising to call. But the final scene is of Daniel and Nolan, walking through the church, talking in hushed voices.

‘I guess it wasn’t such a good day to die.’

‘It absolutely wasn’t.’

‘Promise me you won’t let my warped curiosity, or your need to save everyone, wreck your career.’

Daniel wraps one arm around Nolan’s shoulders in a way that can be interpreted as platonic, or not. ‘Promise me you won’t let your warped curiosity kill you.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a promise I can make.’

They step out into the sunshine. And the credits roll. 

For a moment or two there was silence. Then Rachel sat forward,

‘Oh, you are shitting me? This has been left open for a second season?!’

Randell looked around at us all, wide-eyed in denial. ’Of course not! That’s all I wrote.’

‘And when’s that ever stopped them?’

‘Anything like that would have to come through me.’ I had my suspicions that discussions were already in progress, but I didn’t say anything. I was too exhausted to have that argument right then. Instead, I hugged Nelson a little bit tighter and murmured,

‘I hoped they kept an eye on you, after I left.’

He tipped his head back to look at me. ‘Jesus, did they ever. I couldn’t go anywhere without one of these reprobates following me. It was like having three stalkers. I even caught Joe in the library one afternoon, pretending to read a book. I didn’t realise he knew where it was.’

Joe flipped him the bird. ‘I knew where the library was! The problem was I had to walk passed the union bar to reach it.’

Hand over his heart, Nelson said, ‘The ultimate sacrifice. I thank you.’

We might have slept in the lounge that night, the same way we had done all those years ago in a smaller apartment, but we were older and I really hope wiser, so Nelson and I went to bed, as did Rachel in the spare room. Then again, Joe took the sofa, and Randell didn’t uncurl from the chair, so I guess not everything has changed.

That’s a good thing.


End file.
